Wireless communication has become increasingly available to users on board mobile platforms such as land vehicles, aircraft, spacecraft, watercraft or the like. These wireless communication platforms support remote, hard to access, or mobile user terminals (e.g., vehicular terminals). In particular, these wireless communication platforms often use communication satellites that can provide service coverage over large geographic footprints such as those including remote land-based or water-based regions. Generally, base stations (e.g., ground base stations) send information (e.g., data) to the user terminals through a bent pipe via one or more satellites. More specifically, the base stations send information on a forward link to the satellite in which the satellite receives, amplifies and re-transmits the information to an antenna of one or more fixed or mobile user terminals. The user terminals, in turn, can send data back to the base stations via the satellite. The base stations can provide the user terminals with links to the Internet, public switched telephone networks, and/or other public or private networks, servers and services.
Satellites with steerable High Capacity Payloads (HCP) may be utilized to provide satellite coverage over a geographic region. In some instances, the steerable spot beams of the satellites are prioritized for use by user terminals carrying a high-value passenger such as the president of the United States. This may involve a spot beam being prematurely steered to a handoff point to anticipate receiving handoff from another satellite covering the user terminal. During this time, the communication satellite may idly wait at the handoff point such that the spot beam are otherwise unavailable to other lesser priority vehicles, and the resources of the communication satellite are wasted during the time frame.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have a system and method that take into account at least some of the issues discussed above (e.g., satellite prioritization, location, throughput, and the like), as well as possibly other issues.